With the advent of mobile communications, more and more devices are becoming integrated with the World Wide Web. Everything from a simple cellular phone to more complex mobile devices such as laptops, electronic books, tablets, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and even automobiles are striving to maintain a constant connection to the internet. As a result of all this interconnectivity, websites and other online application providers have been showing an ever increasing interest in providing services to these mobile clients.
For mobile network operators (MNOs) that own the network and access to the mobile subscriber, onboarding all of these third party service providers has not proved to be easy. A multitude of issues and problems may arise when managing large numbers of applications attempting to access the network. These issues include security control, traffic throttling, providing more options and control to the subscriber, as well as translation of communications between various protocols being employed.
In light of these concerns, many network operators have deployed service access gateways or other intermediary entities in order to manage and control the communications exchanged between the various entities and their mobile subscribers. However, these gateway solutions have not addressed all the problems and various shortcomings still exist in the marketplace.
By way of example, different service providers that wish to provide services to the telecom network often need to access it in different formats (i.e. each provider using different protocols, APIs, communications, data, synchronous/asynchronous communications, etc.). The approach to provide such access has generally been either ad hoc-based (each type of service provider connecting to the network by learning how to integrate itself and to access the capabilities exposed) or by providing a generalized interface (web services) for accessing the network capabilities. However, this approach has a number of limitations. For example, the process of learning how to access the underlying network and how to integrate its functionality and services can be a cumbersome and tedious task, involving significant time and costs on the part of the service provider. On the other hand, merely providing a simplified generic interface for all service providers may not be as all-inclusive of certain functionalities and capabilities that can be desirable to a select few providers. What is needed is a simplified way for client applications to access the underlying network and take advantage of all of its needed capabilities in a multitude of formats which can be selectable by the client and one that allows developers to use more familiar functionality and interfaces.